Even before the COVID-19 global pandemic, people have been having trouble making emotional connections with each other if they are physically apart. This is true of long-distance romantic relationships, people wanting to stay in touch with families and friends who live abroad, and even people who do remote work on a daily basis.
Some statistics:
- In India, nearly 33% of workers work remotely every day.
- In the US, 14 million couples are doing long-distance.
- In Australia, ever since the year 2000, international student enrollment numbers have been steadily growing at a rate of 8% per year.
The issue with establishing and keeping connections remotely is that it requires a high amount of effort to accomplish. Even with the ubiquity of VoIP and video calls, people still have to jump through hoops to connect with someone far away.
I personally have been and currently am facing this difficulty as an international student living in New York. A few of the pain points are listed below:
- It requires effort to schedule video calls, phone calls, or even text chats when the people you’re trying to connect with are at a different time zone.
- Even when schedules are lined up, there are often technical difficulties such as when people don’t have the proper software installed on the computer or someone has a slow internet connection.
- Video calls are very intimate and for the most part, require a conversation to happen. Some aspects of relationships exist in simply feeling the presence of the other person without any active collective activity, this is still missing.
- Often times, the other person only exists through a small screen, there is no illusion that the other person is actually there with you.
